Court, camera, action

The Sanjay Dutt case has been the mother of all Bollywood criminal cases. His has been the most serious conviction of a leading Bollywood star. Dutt's conviction comes at a time when Bollywood is going corporate, becoming a global brand and increasingly taking on the status of a legitimate industry.
The industry has come a long way from the time of Dutt's arrest in 1993.This was followed by a troubled period that revealed its links with the underworld.
To combat this nexus, in 2001, the central government formalised industry status for film production, which meant that for the first time in its history Mumbai film-makers had access to finance from state financial institutions and corporate houses.
Legalised channels of film finance have been the most important step to keep the underworld at bay, and corporate logos have become commonplace at the start of the credits.
In 2006, Dutt is also a transformed personality in terms of his star persona. On screen, he was Khalnayak in the 90s.
Khalnayak (1993) was released after his arrest, and the inter-textuality of reel and real life made it a blockbuster.
It was the biggest milestone of Dutt's career till date, and gave his real-life encounter with the law and the state an unprecedented prominence. Dutt became an easy target, both for what he had done, and it seems, for other things that he had not.
It was the right package — the son of two leading personalities of Bombay cinema with impeccable political careers, he had a dubious record of drug abuse and was the quintessential enfant terrible who had graduated to being the iconic anti-hero.
That image stayed with him, and he starred as another iconic anti-hero, Raghubhai in Vaastav, a tragic figure doomed to win and then lose it all. But now he is firmly Munnabhai, that small-time 'dada' with heart of gold, with his unique techniques to bring smiles to people's faces — the humane face of street-smart India.
Munna has his vices but is redeemable at the end of the day.Riding high on the Munnabhai and Gandhigiri wave, Dutt's conviction comes as purge of sorts, for himself and symbolically for the industry itself.
Unlike in 1993, when his arrest revealed the dark face of the industry to the nation, his final conviction this year
is more than what on the face of it appears to be a blow to the new globalising, multiplex-oriented, legalised and corporatising Bollywood.
In her statement to the media, Dutt's sister, Congress MP Priya Dutt, expressed satisfaction over the court recognising that her brother was no terrorist.
She said the verdict brought an end to a 13-year-long agony, and wished their father Sunil Dutt had lived to see the day.
This purge coincides with Dutt transforming himself into a friendly neighbourhood Munna, giving himself life beyond the iconic doomed hero that he has been for a long time.
The industry was surely on tenterhooks in the days leading up to the verdict, what with the crores invested in his films. But there's also a subtext here.
Had Dutt been convicted of purported terrorist activity, it would have meant a lash for the industry as a whole, which has been very anxious to project its new professionalised, techno-savvy, corporate avatar.
With the verdict exonerating him of terrorism charges, there were reports of co-stars and directors rushing to
congratulate him.
Not only had Dutt put behind his Khalnayak avatar, it was also a vindication of the industry turning over a new leaf.
Dutt's career encapsulates the transition of Hindi cinema from its eighties' sex and violence and bad
money days to a new aestheticised and professionalised domain, now aspired to by the urbane middle-classes, which earlier either saw Hindi films on the sly or just wanted nothing to do with them.
The new face of Hindi cinema, with its now established breed of suave actors and directors, has transformed the
popular sense of Hindi films as spurious enterprise, associated with financial irregularities, sex and crime. The Dutt factor is symbolic and quite central to all of this.
The writer is a PhD student at the University of Chicago.